‘death’s proletariat’ metaphysical and the material come together, in the shade of Pharaohs, Greeks,
andRomans, in a war of trucks, jeeps, and perpetual movement. The ‘Fourth Elegy:
El Adem’, echoes the language of the Bible—appropriately enough in such a bitter
place, with more than an echo of Scottish Calvinist fervour: ‘The sons of man|grow
and go down in pain: they kneel for the load|and bow like brutes, in patience
accepting the burden,|the pain fort and dour.’^32 In other poems Henderson uses
snatches of Scots, Gaelic, Italian, and German, quoting from Sorley MacLean,
Cavafy, Dante, Goethe, and Holderlin, while his register moves from soldiers’ slang ̈
to a high-reaching rhetorical address, not far from the passionate strain to be found
in the poets of the New Apocalypse, as in these closing lines from the last elegy:
Run stumble and fall in our desert of failure,
impaled, unappeased. And inhabit that desert
of canyon and dream—till we carry to the living
blood, fire and red flambeaux of death’s proletariat.
Take iron in your arms! At last, spanning this history’s
apollyon chasm, proclaim them the reconciled.^33The final effect can be as stark and uncompromising as the landscape it evokes;
but perhaps the most memorable and successful poems are those that bring this
epic vision closest to the everyday evolution of the troops on both sides. In a poem
that can stand alongside Keith Douglas’s ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ and Sorley MacLean’s
‘Glac a ́ Bhais’, Henderson’s ‘Seventh Elegy: Seven Good Germans’, imagines the`
lives and last hours of seven dead troopers. Or another day in the desert is captured
in the terse free verse of the ‘Second Elegy: Halfaya’:
At dawn, under the concise razor-edge
of the escarpment, the laager sleeps. No petrol fires yet
blow flame for brew-up. Up on the pass a sentry
inhales his Nazionale. Horse-shoe curve of the bay
grows visible beneath him. He smokes and yawns.
Ooo-augh,
and the limitless
shabby lion-pelt of the desert completes and rounds
his limitless ennui.^34Reviewing these elegies for theNew Statesmanin 1949, Giles Romilly remarked on
the ‘distinctive power and clarity’ of such poems from the desert campaign. ‘The
simplicity of the scene, the sense of space, the presence of a manageable number
of objects—can one doubt these set the poet free?...The desert was like the stain
(^32) Henderson, ‘Fourth Elegy: El Adem’, ibid. 57. ‘Peine fort et dur’ was a medieval torture reserved
for those who would plead neither ‘guilty’ nor ‘not guilty’. Rocks were piled upon them until they
succumbed—one way or the other.
(^33) Henderson, ‘Tenth Elegy: The Frontier’, ibid. 72. Apollyon is a demon of the bottomless pit in
Rev. 9: 11. 34
Henderson, ‘Second Elegy: Halfaya’, ibid. 53.